There’s only really so many ways to verify the age of someone that you’ve never seen (actually, it often isn’t all that much easier in person, but that’s another story).

You can treat them as if they’re of-age if they have a credit card, but that’s inaccurate and a violation of credit-card merchant agreements (symptoms include suddenly having to change payment providers).

You can match identification document information against an identification provider like Aristotle-Integrity, but that’s unreliable and fraught with issues, and doesn’t prove that the information describes the applicant.

There must be a simpler way to verify Second Life accounts as adults! Oh, wait…. here it is!

The chair of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, Peter King, has called to place journalist Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks on a US enemies list. US citizens and treaty nation partners of the USA are forbidden to aid or associate with individuals named on that list.

I rather think he’d better add the editors-in-chief of the New York Times, and the Washington Post – and almost every other newspaper to that list, because they’re all essentially doing (and have always done) the same thing as Assange’s Wikileaks – that is, publishing information that has been leaked by US government officials.

The only differences are that Wikileaks offered US departments the opportunity to redact some of that information – an opportunity not normally granted by publishers, but which the US Government declined – and that major newspapers are rather wishing that they were the ones being leaked to first.